Innovation in Saturation

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Not too long ago, a sharing session in my office talked about Proctor & Gamble (P & G). You know, the household care company that sells Febreze and Tide? No we weren't talking about their latest buyout but rather how they changed their way of growing their business and sustaining that growth.

*yea I know I am starting to sound like a marketing pitch, but I have been camping in the office for some time now*

In short, P & G had to figure out a way to make lots of profits and carving out a niche for themselves in an already detergent war-fields of vets. They had to find new weapons and new strategic ops people. How does an army make new weapons? By dumping in cash or in business speak "investments for the future".

With cash came the rouges...someone who wasn't bound by the brass rules... someone who is able to tell an operative to launch a Black Ops into no-man's land. P & G created Innovation Ventures.

*by now you would probably realised that I'm breaking down to the message for to sales and marketing dummies like moi*

As LF went on about P & G during the session, I can actually see the gears in the head of my peers whirring. We all fight our own little war in under the banner of INNOVATION. There is a war to win, not a short term goal of meeting sales targets! How?

The uphill climb for us is to change the receptiveness of the organisation. There is a difference between preaching your objective and actually doing the deed. Anyway that's another rant in another post.

So P & G took a step back to look at their successful businesses. The act of innovation must be spurred and it has to be reliable and repeatable.To start, an organisation must direct:

1) Motivating Purpose and Value
- P & G's tagline is "touching lives, improving lives". P & G decided to touch more lives through innovation

2) Inspiring Leadership
-Pretty much self-explanatory. If your leader does not enforce a new venture, how else could you do any better?

3) Stretching Goals
- Have demanding goals and boy our department feels it every day

                                                        4) Strategy and Innovation Portfolio Linkages
                                                         - Makes tonnes of sense. You need money to finance changes
5) Enabling Organisation Structure
-Top level has to understand what is innovation to structure an organisation to meet it. They have to hire the right people.Unfortunately many are resistant to change

6) Balanced Innovation Types
Now this is the interesting bit. What sort of innovations leave a lasting impression?

So where does your idea fits in? Any earth movers?

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